Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Terrie Waddell -- Wrath: Purging, Cleansing and Appropriating the Deviant Other / Terrie Waddell -- Systemic Book Burning as Evil? / Rebecca Knuth -- The Destructive Power of Medieval Mythology: A Revisionist View of the Extermination of the Cathars and Pequots / William A. Cook -- Satanic Subcultures? A Discourse Analysis of the Self-Perceptions of Young Goths and Pagans / Meg Barker -- The Evils of Christianization: A Pagan Perspective on European History / Michael F. Strmiska -- Sexual Imagery: Locus of Pleasure, Pain, Censorship and Reclamation / Terrie Waddell -- The Female/Feline Morph: Myth, Media, Sex and the Bestial / Terrie Waddell -- Bad Sex: Second-Wave Feminism and Pornography's Golden Age / Loren Glass -- "Video Abuse": Gender, Censorship and I Spit on Your Grave / Darren Oldridge -- Naked Terror: Horrific, Aesthetic and Healing Images of Rape / Madelaine Hron -- Crime: Versions of Guilt, Shame and Redemption / Terrie Waddell -- Masking the Evil of Capital Punishment / Earl F. Martin -- Interrogating the Penal Gaze: Is the Ethical Prison a Possibility? / Diana Medlicott -- The Contraction of the Heart: Anxiety, Radical Evil and Proximity in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Novels / Fiona Peters -- "I did so many bad things": Sin and Redemption in the Films of Abel Ferrara / Paul Davies -- Notes on Contributors / Terrie Waddell.

Cultural Expressions of Evil and Wickedness: Wrath, Sex, Crime , is a fascinating study of the a-temporal nature of evil in the West. The international academics and researchers who have contributed to this text not only concentrate on political, social and legally sanctioned cruelty from the past and present, but also explore the nature of moral transgression in contemporary art, media and literature. Although many forms and practices of what might be called 'evil' are analysed, all are bound by violence and/or the sexually perverse. As this book demonstrates, the old news media axiom, 'if it bleeds it leads,' also extends to the larger pool of popular culture. This absorbing volume will be of interest to anyone who has ever pondered on the exotic, extraordinary and surreal twists of human wickedness.

Description based on print version record.